Consolidated Merchandising Program Breaks New Ground in South Africa

Last fall, after years of groundwork, Daymon South Africa announced the start of a consolidated merchandising pilot at Pick n Pay, the second largest grocery chain in South Africa. The six-month pilot, which began last September and runs through March, is taking place in one of Pick n Pay’s Next Generation stores in Cape Town, where Daymon is now responsible for all merchandising and management of inventory back-ups.

The pilot represents the first step toward implementing the consolidated merchandising solution Daymon has been recommending Pick n Pay implement for years. “Most retail chains in South Africa have multiple service providers working in their stores,” explains Aaron Gottlieb, Vice President of International for Daymon. “Under the traditional model, Pick n Pay may have as many as 100 different merchandising service providers at any one time replenishing the shelves—all fighting for space and driving supplier-centric strategies. This inherently creates inefficiencies in the supply chain, which inflate costs and negatively impact the customer shopping experience.”

By moving to a consolidated model, the pilot is designed to help “stop the space war and focus resources on driving Pick n Pay’s strategy, which also greatly benefits suppliers,” says Gottlieb. Having a single merchandising provider, Gottlieb says, ensures excellence in execution and compliance, greatly streamlining operations, reducing costs and ensuring products are available for customers when they want it.

This pilot program builds on an over 20 year relationship between Daymon and Pick n Pay that has continually strengthened and expanded. “In 1990, Jonathan Ackerman, the son of Pick n Pay founder Raymond Ackerman, worked for Daymon in the United States helping to drive development of Private Brands in the Northeast, recounts Gottlieb. “When Jonathan returned to South Africa a few years later, he introduced the concept to his father and the partnership between Daymon and Pick n Pay was born.”

While Daymon originally began the partnership by introducing the idea of implementing its traditional Private Brand Development engine to the South African market, the concept struggled to generate the necessary momentum due to a relatively underdeveloped supplier base. In an effort to create a sustainable model, Daymon introduced in-store merchandising as a tangible service that was more readily accepted by the market.

“Fast forward 20 years and that became our core service with over 2,000 Daymon associates in 600 stores driving in-store merchandising execution,” says Gottlieb. “Today, merchandising is only one part of our service package at Pick n Pay. We now have what we call the Daymon Ecosystem which integrates a number of services, including a robust Private Brand Development engine—the original vision that was finally realized in 2014. Other services include consumer experience marketing, online order fulfilment and a world-class creative design team.”

Gottlieb says the hope is that the consolidated merchandising pilot program will be a resounding success, producing learnings that can be rolled out to drive excellence across the Pick n Pay footprint.

To learn more about Daymon services in South Africa, contact Vice President Aaron Gottlieb at agottlieb@daymon.com.